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  1. #41
    The Patient Chakah's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    It isn't an excuse when it is valid - Mac is changing the processor their computers run on, not supporting it any more just makes sense.

    There is no putting the blame for this on Blizzard sorry.
    You should look to the developers before assuming so much. The APIs make things much much easier than you might think. Many Mac apps can be made ARM native with a recompile. Its not difficult. The only hangup might be dependancies that aren't ready yet.

  2. #42
    Quote Originally Posted by Chakah View Post
    You should look to the developers before assuming so much.
    No assumptions made .. changing the CPU underneath a complex bit of software is akin to changing your car from imperial to metric screws.

    Challenge Mode : Play WoW like my disability has me play:
    You will need two people, Brian MUST use the mouse for movement/looking and John MUST use the keyboard for casting, attacking, healing etc.
    Briand and John share the same goal, same intentions - but they can't talk to each other, however they can react to each other's in game activities.
    Now see how far Brian and John get in WoW.


  3. #43
    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    It isn't an excuse when it is valid - Mac is changing the processor their computers run on, not supporting it any more just makes sense.

    There is no putting the blame for this on Blizzard sorry.
    As I said last build on beta/ptr added an arm binary on macos

  4. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Fabolt View Post
    As I said last build on beta/ptr added an arm binary on macos
    Indeed... but that doesn't mean anything for some time, if at all.

    My guess is that the next expansion is when it might be seen, if at all.

    Challenge Mode : Play WoW like my disability has me play:
    You will need two people, Brian MUST use the mouse for movement/looking and John MUST use the keyboard for casting, attacking, healing etc.
    Briand and John share the same goal, same intentions - but they can't talk to each other, however they can react to each other's in game activities.
    Now see how far Brian and John get in WoW.


  5. #45
    That means you can basically run it on arm macos already

  6. #46
    Warchief vsb's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by NineSpine View Post
    Every company I’ve worked at gives their software engineers MacBooks, because they are preferred by most people doing “real work”, not to mention that they are substantially more stable and secure than Windows machines.
    Every company I've worked at gives their software engineers HP laptops because they are cheaper and easier to fix than macbooks.

  7. #47
    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    No assumptions made .. changing the CPU underneath a complex bit of software is akin to changing your car from imperial to metric screws.
    not really. Especially with Apple's dev tools, universal binaries can often be compiled by literally just toggling a switch in XCode.

  8. #48
    Herald of the Titans MrKnubbles's Avatar
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    From my personal experience, my Mac mini is the worst piece of garbage I've ever used. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody for anything. The thing is and always has been slow as hell.
    Check out my game, Craftsmith, on the Google Play Store!

  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by vsb View Post
    Every company I've worked at gives their software engineers HP laptops because they are cheaper and easier to fix than macbooks.
    This is definitely not the norm. Macs are not "the norm" either, but a sizeable minority of companies switched to issuing MacBooks(Pro or otherwise) to their software devs (and, in a lot of cases, everyone, even if they had to run Windows via a VM) - generally, the bigger and more important the company, the more likely it was.

    IBM did it some time back; after switching their software developers and IT specialists to Macs, the IT specialists reported back that they were saving more than the extra cost of the Mac Hardware in saving in man hours because of how much easier they were to support. Theyre still universally using MacBooks by default to this day, though users can request to use a PC if they want. Most dont. That will probably change because they wont be able to VM windows for those one or two apps they need anymore - or maybe not, if MS licenses Windows-on-ARM separately from hardware in the future (like, as a product that an OEM or end user can buy).

    Where you find companies issuing shit like HPs and Dells is in companies that can still be defined as "big" but not an IBM-class "Big". My Wife does IT for a hospital system (software side - EMR stuff) and they issue junky strictly-midrange-when-they-were-new Dells to everyone because they cant afford to make an overnight and switch and are pinching pennies to please the profit masters, not realizing that theyd save more in the long run if they just bought better hardware. Meanwhile, working from home, my wife has to deal with the fact that running her required database and EMR software + MS Teams cripples the stupid machine because they bought shit hardware.

    And a lot of the companies that dont do Macs for their IT/Engineers will often skip straight to high-end models with extensive warranties and large corporate support contracts.

    The guys buying cheap HPs and shit are the ones in the middle - objectively big because they are multi-million dollar companies - but actually not really that big.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by MrKnubbles View Post
    From my personal experience, my Mac mini is the worst piece of garbage I've ever used. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody for anything. The thing is and always has been slow as hell.
    depends on what year/model it was. If its the model that was available from late 2013 until the 2018 update, then yeah, they were seriously underpowered. I never understood who the target audience was for that thing - it was basically the guts of a MBA in the Mini chasis.

    The Late 2012 model was actually pretty solid though - a full up i7-HQ, expandable ram and storage. I used one until about a year ago and only stopped using it because the iGPU could no longer handle what i wanted to do (2 1440p displays).

    The newer 2018 model (which is still the one they are selling now, until the M1 hits stores) is also quite solid. Cant upgrade the storage, but they went back to upgradeable RAM, its got TB3 (so if you want to add external storage, itll be plenty fast), much newer iGPU (obviously, since it uses 8th Gen Core chips) and its using full Desktop CPUs, not laptop-grade HQ chips. The model with the 8600 in it is pretty great, though it costs about 150$ too much.

    For daily driving, and doing light production (that wont require a dGPU), the M1 Mini looks to be pretty solid. I wouldn't call it a workstation, but its plenty fast for the target audience for most Macs:

    People who just need a daily driver and video watching machine.

    Thats the target audience for the Mini, MBA, and basic iMac. Just average-schlub consumers.

    Where its going to fall down is that it will still suck rocks at gaming (the CPU cores actually seem plenty beef running native code) - its the iGPU that isn't even as good as a 1050 that's going to be the problem. But Apple doesn't (and hasn't) really cared about that. Itll do iOS games, which Apple makes billions on, so thats good enough for Apple.

    Anyone buying a Mac to game on needs to get a clue, and i say that as a nearly lifelong Mac guy. If you want to game, get a consle or build a gaming rig. For ~600$ you can build a decent 1080p rig that wil make the basic M1 Macs bite the curb just because of the difference in GPU power. And youll actually be able to play more than ~10% of the games on the market.

  10. #50
    The Patient Chakah's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kagthul View Post
    THe other part people either dont remember, weren't around for, or never knew is that Blizzard, for a LONG ass time had a dedicated core of Mac devs that were serious Mac evangelists, that were the ones responsible for Mac support from Blizzard.

    ALL of those guys are gone.
    Yup... and now if the bean counters at Activision think they can make an extra $1m per month from Mac support, it will happen.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kagthul View Post
    Then there's the assumption that the M2, M3, etc are going to all always be giant massive leaps in performance like we've seen from the A-series chips. Thats not a given. ARM performance WILL plateau. ARM's currently the darling of the world because of its efficiency/power ratio, which is largely better than current X86 offerings - but in no world anywhere is it anywhere NEAR the performance of dedicated X86 high-power chips. For all the power the A12X has, it is still brutally curbstomped by a Ryzen 5 5600X in top-end performance.
    You should read the Anandtech article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226...-a14-deep-dive

    But here are some spoilers (note A14 - a predecessor to M1):





    From the conclusion:

    Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world. Given our data on the A14, beating all of Intel’s designs, and just falling short of AMD’s newest Zen3 chips – a higher clocked Firestorm above 3GHz, the 50% larger L2 cache, and an unleashed TDP, we can certainly believe Apple and the M1 to be able to achieve that claim.This moment has been brewing for years now, and the new Apple Silicon is both shocking, but also very much expected. In the coming weeks we’ll be trying to get our hands on the new hardware and verify Apple’s claims.


    The next few weeks will be something to watch closely.

  11. #51
    people at blizzard work and live on macs, they'll keep macos 100%
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  12. #52
    Quote Originally Posted by Chakah View Post
    Yup... and now if the bean counters at Activision think they can make an extra $1m per month from Mac support, it will happen.



    You should read the Anandtech article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226...-a14-deep-dive

    But here are some spoilers (note A14 - a predecessor to M1):





    From the conclusion:



    The next few weeks will be something to watch closely.
    These benchmarks are optimized for mobile phones, i.e. ARM. Ofc ARM processors would work well in those. The problem with all those benchmarks is that they're only showing workloads that those SoCs are optimized for, or even have ASICs integrated to handle them. Once you present them with a general purpose workload they're going to struggle as much as your chromebook struggles compared to your desktop PC.
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  13. #53
    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    Indeed... but that doesn't mean anything for some time, if at all.

    My guess is that the next expansion is when it might be seen, if at all.
    WoW functions on being able to play on as many computers as possible. It has generally low system requirements and pretty much if you can put a keyboard and mouse on it you're good.

    You also don't know the exact metrics of number of WoW players on a Mac.

    I think your cart is way before your horse.

    But I also think that Acti/Blizz is working on server side gaming akin to NVidia shield or Google Stadia - which is why they removed Acti/Blizz games from Nvidia.

    My guess is in 3 to 5 years we'll be able to buy a dongle that plays WoW and all other Acti/Blizz games for MSRP and a monthly fee.

  14. #54
    Stood in the Fire Sinaa's Avatar
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    Arm is the future of personal computing. WoW will need to be ported eventually as well.

  15. #55
    Quote Originally Posted by Kagthul View Post
    not really. Especially with Apple's dev tools, universal binaries can often be compiled by literally just toggling a switch in XCode.
    This.

    It’s amazing the number of PC gamer bros here who know absolutely nothing about development or engineering but think they are geniuses because they read gamer hardware articles.
    "stop puting you idiotic liberal words into my mouth"
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  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by Chakah View Post
    Apple claims the M1 to be the fastest CPU in the world
    They do not claim that. They may claim fastest core on laptops and fastest integrated gpu?
    Even 200$ desktop CPUs are still simiar to the M1 on x86. 300$ desktop cpu beats M1s ARM scores on both single and multi core. It's a really really good laptop, similar to the most expensive laptops if no need for graphic powers, but for desktops it's not anything special yet.

  17. #57
    With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta.

    We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.
    https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...mber-16/722775

  18. #58
    Quote Originally Posted by Chakah View Post
    Yup... and now if the bean counters at Activision think they can make an extra $1m per month from Mac support, it will happen.
    1 Million a month? On what planet. Back during the height of WoW, (LK) the Mac Devs (some of the only Devs ever to post regularly and respond regularly on the forums) outright said they never had more than ~200,000 unique accounts that logged in via a Mac and a decent portion of those also logged in via PC, meaning they were likely logging in on a work Mac laptop. Id try to find it but with the old forums being gone, im not sure its readily available out there and im not spending hours searching for it.

    That number is assuredly WAY lower these days since WoWs total sub number is down to lower numbers than Mid-Vanilla.

    Now, as it happens, Blizz appears ready for day-1 native support. Keep in mind i never said that they absolutely wouldn't support ARM Macs, merely that, given their now dislike for supporting Apple, that it would not have surprised me if they had taken this opportunity to kill Mac Support. They chose not to, so, cool.

    You should read the Anandtech article. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226...-a14-deep-dive
    What does that have to do with what i said? What i said was that assuming that the M2 is going to be a giant leap over the M1 and the M3 would be a giant leap over the M2, etc, was a terrible assumption. Nothing in that article has shit to say about that.

    But here are some spoilers (note A14 - a predecessor to M1):
    Yes and no. The A14 uses the same cores as the M1; they are just clocked higher in the M1 (and there are more of them, instead of 1BIG.3Little, its 4/4) Though not by a huge amount, it seems.

    The next few weeks will be something to watch closely.[/FONT][/COLOR]
    The next few weeks have literally nothing to do with whether or not Apple can continue to deliver geometric power (in the "how good this CPU is" form of "Power" not power consumption, which is literally meaningless for desktop machines) gains - which i am massively skeptical that they can.

    The A14 isn't actually much more powerful than the A12X that was in the devkit Mini they released a while back. The M1 is more powerful only because of more cores and a better core layout (4/4) and higher clock speeds allowed by a non-Phone/Tablet form factor.

    There's a high chance that somewhere around the M4 we will see power increases fall off quite a bit. RISC has traditionally been EXTREMELY challenged on raw clock speed; it often relies on extensive software support to make up for it, which can compensate to a degree, but not indefinitely.

    And its not like X86 is sitting still. (Lets also note that these benches are never showing the X86 chips OCed at all, just running bone-stock, often without even using XMP/OCed RAM, which, particularly in the case of Zen, can provide non-trivial performance gains (10% or more). Both super-early Zen 4 looks and Rocket Lake S benchmarks are showing ~20% IPC increases, which combined with both architectures having a pretty solid ability to hit 5.3+ ghz, keep them extremely competitive.

    There's no evidence (yet, it may come) that this technology can lead to heavily Multicore chip arrangements. For most consumers, even light production loads, A solid 10-12 core solution on this silicon would be plenty. But for people doing "real" workloads, a 64 Core Threadripper CPU is still going to make even a 12-16 core "M2" or whatever bite the curb pretty hard.

    And integrated RAM in just a shitberg. One of the reasons the various Mac Pros have the longevity they do is because you can add tons of RAM, storage, etc - lots of expansion. You try to sell Pros machines with 16GB of non-upgradeable RAM and theyre going to revolt.

    Again, im not saying its utter garbage or isn't impressive for what it is.

    Im just saying its not all Hookers and Sunshine and there's NO evidence to support the seeming widespread belief that AppleSilicon(tm) chips are going to continue with 40% uplifts from one generation to the next (that certainly hasn't been the case from the A12 onwards, for instance).

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by iosdeveloper View Post
    people at blizzard work and live on macs, they'll keep macos 100%
    Lolwut?

    Thats literally never been true. Any tour (theyve done several video tours) will show quite clearly that there are almost no Macs in sight there. The Mac evengelists all left the building long ago (Cata at the latest).

  19. #59
    The Patient Chakah's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by schwarzkopf View Post
    Indeed... but that doesn't mean anything for some time, if at all.

    My guess is that the next expansion is when it might be seen, if at all.

    https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/mac-support-update-november-16/722775


    M1/ARM is supported.

    With this week’s patch 9.0.2, we’re adding native Apple Silicon support to World of Warcraft. This means that the WoW 9.0.2 client will run natively on ARM64 architecture, rather than under emulation via Rosetta.
    We’re pleased to have native day one support for Apple Silicon.
    LOL that didn't age well.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Thunderball View Post
    These benchmarks are optimized for mobile phones, i.e. ARM. Ofc ARM processors would work well in those. The problem with all those benchmarks is that they're only showing workloads that those SoCs are optimized for, or even have ASICs integrated to handle them. Once you present them with a general purpose workload they're going to struggle as much as your chromebook struggles compared to your desktop PC.
    Citation needed.

    Machines are just now getting into peoples hands, so benchmarks will be forthcoming over the next days/weeks.
    Here are a couple of other early ones:

    https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16...sd-benchmarks/
    https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/16...nch-benchmark/

  20. #60
    Quote Originally Posted by Chakah View Post
    Yup... and now if the bean counters at Activision think they can make an extra $1m per month from Mac support, it will happen.



    You should read the Anandtech article. [URL]https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive[URL]

    But here are some spoilers (note A14 - a predecessor to M1):

    [IMG]https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16226/111168.png[IMG]

    [IMG]https://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph16226/119329.png[IMG]

    From the conclusion:



    The next few weeks will be something to watch closely.
    Are you really comparing platforms that work on different instruction sets. If the benchmark were written using the actual x86-64 instruction set the a14 literally wouldn't be able to run it...

    You realize that's what the R in Risc which is the R in Arm means?

    None if this makes sense. Arm is used for low power devices like phones and tablets because of its efficiency. Low power implies better thermals. But not better performance. It makes sense for the the form factors they released so far, I guess. A small laptop and a small form factor pc. But there's nothing "pro" about this. They have the advantage with process node, but again that drives better efficiency, not performance.

    You could probably get better performance and performance per watt from a nehalem i7.

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